Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

8. Strategic Missions

8 Strategic Missions Limited access to resources stimulates the development of survival strategies to make up for scarcity. When the solution to poverty is market based, and the market deepens one’s poverty, survival becomes germane. In the absence of realizing security through the state, women attempt to stabilize fluctuations in the resources they had available at any given moment. The emphasis on sanctioning recipients and the single-minded focus of work was often counter-productive, as women experienced shortfalls and crises, and expended a great deal of their time and resources responding to them. We must turn our attention to the ways in which Black women act against constraints. How do Black women who are battered and poor survive the poverty and displacement brought about by abuse and policy sanctions? I found that during and after the shelter experience, even when they are situated in their own homes, women continued to experience hardships in terms of finances, housing, and child care because government assistance was so tenuous. Since poor women have rarely been able to survive on welfare payments, they have always had to construct survival strategies. I was able to observe four strategies deployed by the women whose lives I have examined in this study. Each served to help women create stable households and families despite the constraints they faced. These strategies included: the creation of fictive kin support networks; the development of instrumental relationships; the use of speech acts; and engagement in illegalities. While 153 they are discussed independently, this in no way suggests that women employ only one strategy at a time, as they use as many as are necessary at any given moment. Evidence of these strategies have come up at various points in this ethnography. For example, in chapter 5, when I discuss the risks women like Gina and Joelle took, I note that they were willing to or did engage in criminal survival activities. Gina was forced to consider prostitution, while Joelle sold drugs because they were unable to earn enough money in the wage labor market. In this chapter, I present the strategies alluded to in previous chapters as coherent responses to the overlapping spheres in which welfare reform policy has an affect on women’s needs during and after their shelter stay. In discussing these survival strategies, I note that they are all responses to abuse and poverty. Some are intended to address poverty; others are particular to the experiences of abuse. However, these strategies are now being deployed at this particular historical moment characterized by a sharp decline in public sector resources dedicated to serving the poor. So they are discussed as broad responses formed at the intersection of poverty, race, and violence . In the lives of these women, these overlapping experiences cannot be readily separated into categories. I would argue that each of the strategies used reflects how this group of women invent responses to deal with the external events that make life so hard, and dangerous. Creating Fictive Kin Since most of the women spent up to 3 months at the shelter, they came to know each other very well, and the relationships they developed lasted well beyond shelter life. Because the escalation of violence in women’s lives caused family ties to disintegrate, women like Clemmie (whose life story is told at the beginning of this ethnography) attempted to recreate the family that was lost due to violence. What she wanted to do was to build a safe home for her children and to restore the sense of family she had lost. The challenge of accomplishing 154 Strategic Missions this goal was exacerbated by the fact that Clemmie needed a new identity for herself, since her batterer could locate her through her social security number. Without a new social security number, Clemmie was unable to secure a job and could not get utilities turned on in her name. She was dependent upon RVCDSS and the Social Security Administration to make a decision as to whether or not a new identity was possible. Although the process for changing Clemmie’s social security number was initiated the same month she arrived at the shelter in November of 1998, Clemmie had heard nothing by February of 1999, when it was time for her to leave the shelter to move into her own place, which she ultimately did. Clemmie wanted to reconstitute the family she so missed and did...